Articles

This is being written on June 20th, 2014, basically 2/3rds of the way
through the month, and roughly half way through the year. Over there
on the right hand side it says that the project has received a total
of just under $1800 this month.

I really don't like writing articles about Ardour and money. I like to
think that successful and worthy projects will magically fund
themselves, and obviously, I like to think that Ardour is successful
and worthy. This is wrong thinking, however.

This isn't a music site, but Ardour exists mostly for the purpose
of about making music and as we draw close to the end of 2013, I
wanted to provide my own counter to a few other websites' "Best of
2013" music lists. I listen to music almost non-stop while developing
Ardour - often Soma.FM's
"Sonic Universe" stream - and it plays a very important role in
the process, and my life in general.

Some people who come across Ardour and start reading about its "odd" license (the GPL, used by thousands or tens of thousands of software applications and libraries around the world) end up asking "what is with this whole open source/free software thing anyway?" or "why don't the Ardour developers just release Ardour like a normal commercial, proprietary program?".

It isn't a complete answer to this kind of question, but as exhibit 13.1(a) part 8, I offer you:

The packaging of "builtin" LADSPA plugins in Ardour 2.8.13 was broken, making all 95 plugins included there unusable. A new package was released to correct the problem, but if you already downloaded 2.8.13 you might want to fix the problem in a faster, more direct way.

I had written an article here about using MP3 files with Ardour. Our Linux users often ask why they can't import MP3 files. The article explained the licensing issues that make that tricky, and then went on to explain why using MP3 (or other lossy compression format) files as source material in a project is a bad idea. I am still very strongly convinced that it continues to be a bad idea, but it seems counter-productive to have that debate in this context. I have left everyone's comments in place for those who want to read them.

Required libraries

Although Ardour 2.8.9 no longer suffers from the subtle bug that caused the mute button(s) to no longer work by default, many users of Ardour will not see the situation change until they remove their ~/.ardour2/ardour.rc file. This probably contains default settings for mute like this:

If your version of this file has value="no" for those options, you should either edit it by hand (its just a text file) so that it says value="yes" instead or just remove the file entirely. Editing is preferable, but removing the file will not hurt. Note that the following values y,Y,1,yes,Yes,YES are all equivalent to "yes" and similarly n,N,0,no,No,NO are all equivalent to "no".

You should also check the file /etc/ardour2/ardour_system.rc, or a related location if you installed Ardour somewhere non-standard) for the same issue, though it is less likely to be seen there. Do NOT remove this file - if it contains "no" as the settings for these options, you should edit the file.

People sometimes criticize a piece of software as being "unintuitive". In fact, its one of the most common complaints you'll hear whenever anyone starts using a new piece of software. Its often entirely justified too - its rare that a complex application manages to be obvious to every new user, or even most new users. Some software developers have a good track record here, Apple in particular, whose rules and guidelines for how to design user interfaces keeps on manage to churn out remarkably intuitive software. Well, it does as long the application is fairly simple and its scope is well defined. By the time you get to applications such as Final Cut Pro or Logic Pro, it would be hard to find anyone who found them "intuitive" in the same way that, say, iTunes or even Garageband is. Read more below ...

Lets collect some photographs of Ardour setups, perhaps with info on the other gear you're using it with. It doesn't have to be fancy - anything that might help convince others that Ardour might be a useful tool for them. You can include a link to a small photo in an <img> tag, and then include the text of the full link - I or someone will convert into a proper link later. First up, Niels Ott in Tübingen, Germany